“I can’t tell you, Iris,” Zoe said. “You’d keep talking about it all the time. And I want to talk about life, cute boys, and things that matter at my age. Anyhow, now you know, and you’ll never stop talking about it.”
“So if not beauty, then what?” Iris was back to the point again.
“I really don’t know,” Zoe said. “All I can think of is that the girls have something precious to the Beasts. Something so subtle, none of us can pick it out so easily, unless we’ve befriended all the girls before they were taken.”
“Which is just impossible,” Iris said. “You know what new question just popped in my head?”
“Enlighten me,” Zoe pursed her lips.
“What if there is something the Beasts are looking for in those girls, and once they find it, collect it, accumulate it or whatever, they have no more need for The Second?”
Zoe shrugged. “You mean…”
“I mean that once they take what they want, we will not be of use to them anymore,” Iris said. “What if they never saved us? What if they only preserved us, like some lab rats and then,” Iris puffed air from the palm of her hands. “Poof.”
“That’s some creepy thought,” Zoe said. “I don’t want to even consider it.”
The silence stole the air from the room for a moment as Iris, like usual, never looked away from Zoe, convinced her conclusion was most plausible. Her stare was too sharp. Zoe didn’t know what to do, until a small pebble came knocking on Iris’s window.
“Who could that be?” Iris wondered, walking to the window.
“It’s probably Cody,” Zoe said. “Maybe he is embarrassed to knock.”
“Why would he be embarrassed?” Iris pulled the window open, as another pebble hit her in the forehead. She took the hit like a champ, then looked down with anger in her eyes.
“Sorry,” said the voice from below. Iris couldn’t believe her eyes. It was Colton.
15
“What are you doing here?” Iris asked, half-blushing. Colton was down below her window, throwing pebbles so she’d open up. Who’d have thought?
“I need to talk to you,” he said. He didn’t even bother whispering. This was a boy who was used to getting what he wanted. He didn’t have the courtesy to whisper or act a little polite, so Iris’s neighbors wouldn’t hear him.
“You need to talk me?” Iris pointed at her chest.
“Yes, you. What’s so strange about that? Come on, come down now,” he said, as if he was just telling her about the weather.
“No, I am not coming down,” Iris said. “You can’t just knock on my window and tell me to come down.”
“Oh.” he mopped his forehead. “I’m sorry. I guess I have crossed the line. Look, there is something important I need to tell you. I think I discovered something.”
“Is that who I think it is?” Zoe craned her neck from under Iris’s arm. “Hi Colton,” she waved at him. “It’s Zoe, from class.”
“Zoe,” he pretended to know her. “But of course. How are you?”
“He asked me how I am doing,” Zoe giggled at Iris.
“I heard,” Iris pulled her back.
“I’m sorry if it’s a bad time,” Colton said.
“Wait,” Iris said. “We’re coming down.”
“Thank you,” Colton said. “I’m sorry again. It’s just, I’ve never really known a girl as just a friend, if you know what I mean…”
“Colton,” Iris warned him. “Stop talking. You’re blowing it. I am coming down. Let’s see what this is about, Zoe.”
“Are you seriously going down without taking a snapshot of him standing down by your window?” Zoe had already pulled out her phone. “You realize this isn’t going to happen again, right? This is practically history in the making.”
“Shut up Zoe.” Iris pulled her out of the room.
Colton stood waiting next to his sports car when they arrived, the exact time Cody came chugging up on his motorcycle.
“Cody!” Zoe waved.
Cody came up wearing a tuxedo that looked a size or two bigger than it should. Iris thought Zoe should later teach him to wear a size that fit, if this ever worked out between them. Not that Zoe was the best of dressers, but certainly better than Cody. Also, she wondered how Zoe was going to ride on the motorcycle with her new dress.
“Bro,” Cody nodded at his brother.
Colton nodded back silently, a little confused.
“So this is going to be a double date?” Cody clapped his hands together with enthusiasm. “So cool. Two brothers, and two… you’re not related, right?”
“This isn’t a double date, Cody.” Iris was firm about it, hoping her reddened cheeks wouldn’t show in the dark of the street.
“Yeah, really. It isn’t,” Colton confirmed, looking a bit fazed.
“Alright,” Cody tried to think of what this was then. “So what is it? Is Iris coming with us, so she makes sure I am not a serial killer?” he turned to Zoe. “Because I’m not. Really. Ask Colton.”
Colton looked as if he wished he could disappear. This was just an awkward situation. “Yes, really. He isn’t a serial killer. A serial hacker maybe, but not a killer.” Colton said, rather mockingly.
Iris almost laughed out loud at how different the two brothers were. One was calm as hell, and the other was lucky he could still stand straight.
“Colton just came to talk to Iris about something,” Zoe explained to Cody. “It’s pure coincidence.”
“Ah,” Cody raised a genius finger. “It must be about the…”
“Cody,” Iris snapped. “You should go now. You two are late for Vera’s birthday party.”
“You’re going to Vera’s birthday party?” Colton looked too eager to know. So unlike him, Iris thought.
“Yeah,” Cody said. “Aren’t you coming? You’re the party animal.”
“I was,” Colton said. “But I’ll pass. Is she going to be eighteen tonight at twelve?”
“No,” Cody pouted. “She’s going to be eighteen two years from now, when Uranus clashes into Mars. Of course, she’ll be eighteen tonight. You’re funny bro.” He pretended he was opening an invisible door for Zoe, then ushered her to ride behind him. Iris watched Zoe play princess, pretending there was actually a door.
“Shouldn’t you get a cab?” Iris wondered. “Zoe’s dress is going to get messed up on that thing.”
“It’s not a motorcycle,” Cody said, starting the engine. “It’s a unicorn.”
Colton laughed in a good way. “Have fun, bro,” he said, and waved goodbye to Cody’s chugging unicorn. Although Colton was smiling, Iris had sensed his concern about Vera and her birthday. She wondered about what he’d discovered.
16
“Before you tell me anything, you need to understand that you can’t come throwing pebbles at my window again,” Iris sat in the comfortable passenger seat of Colton’s car. Like most things in The Second, it was a shade of shiny metallic silver. There was no point in asking how much it cost.
“I understand,” said Colton. “I just had to tell you something.”
“You said that before,” Iris wondered why she treated him a bit too bluntly. She must have been pressured by his sudden visit. “What is it?”
Colton pulled out Eva’s picture with Vera and Elia. It took a second for Iris to connect the dots. “You came to show me that the three of them knew each other?”
“Two of them were called by the Beasts,” Colton said. “I think maybe Vera is next.”
Iris pondered the thought in her head. She was dying for something to connect the girls the Beasts took, but the three of them being friends wasn’t that much of a connection. “I think it’s just coincidence.”
“Eva and then Elia, in two consecutive weeks?”
“I bet Eva has many other pictures with other girls that have not been called,” Iris pointed out. “Besides, Vera is going to be eighteen in a couple of hours, and Elia was taken yesterday. Never have the Beasts taken two girls in such a short period. No
girl is going to be taken again for five days, at least.”
“I didn’t know that,” Colton said.
“Everyone knows that,” Iris said. “Maybe you don’t know it because you’re a boy, or maybe because you never really cared, before Eva.” She tried not to meet his eyes saying the last part, but she had to be honest about it.
“You’re right. I never cared about anything, but me,” Colton said, looking disappointed with himself. The boy had been scoring point after point with her. She wondered if he knew that, or if he even liked her in the slightest.
“So that’s all? I think I should go,” she said. Sitting with him in the same car already made her dreamy.
“I know you think that I am a bad person, but believe me, I’m trying to be a better man,” he said. Iris was going to kiss him violently and tell him he wasn’t that bad, but then she discovered it was all in her head. The boy was grieving. “I’ve discovered something else. Something important about the Pentimento idea.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll have to show it to you myself,” he started the engine and clicked the doors closed automatically, without even asking her. “Buckle up, Iris.”
17
Colton drove toward the Great Wall near the bakery house. He parked his car in a VIP garage that was tangent to where the robots stopped anyone from going further, a mile before the wall. Iris didn’t comment as she saw him use his father’s ID to enter the garage as a VIP. Inside, he parked the car, and then ushered her to walk the long mile beside him, directly toward the wall.
“I am going to assume you stole your father’s ID, and that what we’re doing is totally illegal.” Iris said.
“Totally,” Colton said, walking. “I’m sorry to put you through this, but you have to see.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Iris smiled. “I told you, I like illegal. I am starting to really wonder why I haven’t been expelled from school so far.”
Colton laughed admiringly at her. Iris’s heart sank to her feet. Did this guy admire her somehow? Of course not, Iris. He is just a rich brat, and you’re a poor amusing doll. Do you think he really doesn’t know you like him?
“Don’t you care about breaking anyone’s rules?” Colton wondered.
“You’re breaking them too.”
“Going with you to the Ruins was my first law-breaking endeavor, actually.”
“I’m starting not to like you now,” Iris said. One point down, she thought.
“Does that mean you like me at least a little bit?” Colton didn’t look at her. He kept walking straight ahead. She couldn’t see his face clearly. Did he really mean it?
“That’s beside the point,” Iris said.
“Of course,” he swallowed. “I have to admit, it felt so good breaking the rules though.”
“And stealing your father’s ID?”
“Much better,” Colton laughed. “I asked my grandmother, a lovely lady who likes to tell jokes about my father when he was a kid, about the Great Wall. She was kind enough to tell me that the Council members had access to the Great Wall and beyond it. She is in a wheelchair, and she winked at me, as if wanting me to go see for myself.”
“I’m not surprised how the Council members have access to the Great Wall,” Iris said. “But how do they get to the Ruins? Do they just walk through?”
Iris followed Colton through the empty mile leading to the Great Wall, which looked as if it were unreachable. No matter how close they walked to it, all Iris saw was the horizon of land underneath a never-ending sky.
“Yes.” Colton stretched an arm toward the sky. It disappeared behind it. “The Sky is a hologram. An illusion. Some brilliant technology where you’d think it’s a far away sky, when you can just walk through it and reach the Ruins.”
“I knew that, but I never thought you could just walk through it.”
“Crazy technology, right?” Colton said, and strode forward, half of his body now buried behind the hologram of the sky. “The birds are an illusion too. The Beasts don’t want anyone to know that. That’s why there are guards a mile before the Great Wall. Now, let’s walk in. We don’t need the tunnel under the bakery.”
Reluctantly, Iris followed Colton, and walked through the Great Wall. It felt like walking into a huge sponge, or a car wash. She could feel the texture of the hologram wet on her skin, but only for three or four feet. Then the world darkened again, and they were in the Ruins.
“Is that what you wanted to show me?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
18
Iris took some time treading through the Ruins, as if for the first time. She stole a brief look behind her at the back of the Great Wall, then continued walking. It was interesting how entering the same place from a different door changed how she saw things. It was like discussing the same subject from a newer point of view.
“Do you have any explanation why the Council created the Wall that way?” Iris asked Colton.
“All I can think of is that they needed to get in and out of the Ruins repeatedly. Why, I have no clue,” Colton said. “What I’m really concerned about is their use of such an illusion, and by that I mean the Great Wall. Can you imagine that the sky and horizon we see from afar while driving each day is an illusion?”
“I am still trying to digest it, Colton,” Iris said. “But what did we expect them to do? Build a giant steel fortress of a wall and inform everyone that The Second is nothing but a close-minded society, surrounded by the aftermath of the mistakes of our past? The wall completes the lie we live in here under the Beasts’ order.”
“Which brings me to the thing I had to show you,” Colton said.
“Colton. I feel like I’ve opened a hole in your mind when I showed you the Ruins.”
“You did,” he said, pointing at a row of two-story buildings he wanted to go to. “I won’t back off now. I owe it to Eva.”
Although it wasn’t reasonable, Iris could have felt jealous now. But she admired Colton instead. Even though she’d doubted his relationship with Eva had been truly from the heart, he wasn’t going to let her misery go unnoticed. It was clear that if she was still alive, and he could find a way to save her, Colton was going to do so.
“So what do you want to show me? And what does it have to do with what I just said?”
“In a minute,” Colton said. “We’re getting closer. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this thing, and discovered that the key to unlocking this mystery is to know what really happened before the Beasts.”
“Some kind of war,” Iris suggested as they stopped in front of the two-story house. “I imagine it was a terrible war that destroyed the sky above and turned it gray.” Iris glanced up for a second, then looked around her at the mess of the Ruins. “The kind of war that killed people. And damaged plants, turning them into horrible black seeds bending awkwardly out of the earth’s soil? A war that disfigured every animal species and turned them into some new-born monsters?” Iris was speculating from the top of her head. She’d never really thought much about it. Someone had destroyed the world, and the Beasts had restored it for some unknown reason.
“Here is a big part of the answer to what happened,” Colton waved the black light instrument at the house’s wall to show her a new Pentimento he’d found.
“You’ve been seriously working this out,” Iris was impressed. “And you’ve already searched the Ruins for other Pentimentos?”
“Just look,” Colton insisted.
The part of the peeled paint from under the new paint showed another old graffiti. It was written on a whim, with an awkward angle upward and to the right, and not all of it was visible. Only the words “rising.”
“Rising?” Iris grimaced.
“Come here,” Colton ran eagerly to the next building, splaying the light on another wall where it said, in the same handwriting and reddish spray, “upris.”
“And here,” Colton’s enthusiasm was contagious. He continued showing her the red paint on most of t
he buildings on this street. It was clear that the word written underneath was “uprising.”
“I get it, Colton. Stop.” Iris calmed him down. His eagerness to know what happened to Eva was exhausting her mind. “So there was an uprising before the Beasts came. It’s not that surprising. If nations managed to mess up the world so bad, then there definitely were people who wanted to make things right.”
“The question is, an uprising against who?” Colton said.
“The government, I guess,” Iris speculated. “Whatever was equivalent to the Council of their time.”
“You said it yourself, the Council,” Colton said.
“You lost me now. What are you saying?”
“Remember the saying ‘humans only see what they…?’ I don’t think it was written by humans. I think it was written by the Beasts.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Colton.” Iris said. “Why would they?”
“What if the Beasts never really arrived, Iris?” Colton held her by the shoulder. It was a firm grip, but it didn’t hurt.
“Are you saying there are no Beasts?” Iris found herself staring up at the gray sky, then back to Colton with his intense blue eyes. “Are you saying the Beasts are an illusion like the Great Wall? That they are simply made up by humans? The Council?”
19
Although everyone else neglected them at the party, Zoe was having a great time with Cody. He was as clumsy and awkward as they come, but he was making a great effort to impress her. She’d imagined he’d tried to make an impression on Iris as well, but it didn’t bother Zoe. She figured he was just lonely. Something told her that boys like him stick around if they fall in love. They’d be lonely enough to cherish being with someone they appreciate, and sharing a life together.
Except for a few glasses spilled, a little tripping while entering the birthday, and talking non-stop, Cody was okay.
“You know what we are in this party?” Cody whispered to her, trying his best to hold onto his glass among the crowd. He told her he never drank out of such fancy glasses, and that he preferred paper cups. Even better, drinking straight from bottles.
Dark Roses: Eight Paranormal Romance Novels Page 145
